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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26447680">Embers That Were Her Toes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss'>gloss</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Office (US)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Annihilation Fusion, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Minor Character Death, post-3x22 "Beach Games"</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:01:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,900</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26447680</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Pam's walk over the coals brings huge changes to the world.</p><p>(Fusion with <i>Annihilation</i>, book and film.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Pam Beesly/Karen Filippelli</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Embers That Were Her Toes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphrodite_mine/gifts">aphrodite_mine</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>for M. with all my heart ♥<br/>I tried for "sad queer romance with body horror" but all I got was "queer romance".</p><p>This is also indebted to Kate Schapira's meditation on Annihilation, <a href="http://www.essaypress.org/ep-98/">Time To Be Something Other Than Human</a>, in countless ways.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>May brought with it longer twilights, chilly in the shadows, while the sky took its sweet time withdrawing into the dark. Sometimes the remains of a sunset lingered near the horizon for almost an hour, in strung-out stripes of pink and carmine, or as lemony flushes along the swollen bottoms of clouds. Other evenings, night fell much more quickly, swallowing you right up with the noise of peepers.</p><p>That night was overcast. A few patches of sky shimmered, indistinct and separate, before drawing together. They formed into teardrops and ran over the horizon down into the world.</p><p>When she saw it over the tops of the trees across the lake, Pam assumed she was still riding the high of her walk over the coals. Peepers throbbed, out of time with her pulse sounding on the soles of her feet; she told herself she was tired. She hugged her knees and kept her feet in the cold water.</p><p>The sky couldn't just pull apart and reform like that. A woman could hardly walk barefoot across fire into another world. Impossibly beautiful things did not happen in Scranton.</p><p>On the bus ride back to the office park, she fell asleep. When she woke, it was to distraught chatter and shouts. She hobbled out to the parking lot; there was gunfire in the distance. </p><p>Everyone — even Michael! — had someone to go home to, someone to worry about. Pam's parents were two hours away and everyone's phones were already useless. Until it died with a screech, the radio played air-raid sirens and babbling reports of the Lackawanna Coal Mine blossoming beneath shimmering sheets of light. The lights burst and danced, everywhere and nowhere all at once.</p><p>Stanley's red Corolla peeled out of the lot just as Mose Schrute arrived.</p><p>He was driving a black pumpkin drawn by a pair of otters the size of ponies.</p><p>Jim laughed, quickly and loudly, with big wet gulps interspersed with the barks of laughter. He kept pointing at Mose and Dwight, shaking his head, even as he yanked open his car door and threw himself inside. His engine gunning, he left even faster than Stanley had.</p><p>"Welp," Karen said and sank down onto the curb next to Pam. "There goes my ride. How're your feet?"</p><p>"Hurty," Pam said. </p><p>Over the trees to the west side of the lot, the shimmers gathered and wove. Maybe that was what the Northern Lights looked like. She'd always meant to go see them.</p><p>"He says this was an ordinary carriage and pair of horses when he buggy-jacked them," Dwight announced to no one in particular. One of the otters was snuffling his hand fairly aggressively. "I'm inclined to believe him."</p><p>"Guess it's a good thing we never moved in together," Karen continued and tugged the sleeves of her hoodie over her hands.</p><p>"Cold?" Pam asked.</p><p>"That, too," she replied. There were violet shadows under her eyes like bruises. When she spoke again, it sounded like a secret. "Imagine if he cared enough not to forget me."</p><p>The coals still burned under Pam's feet. Maybe they always would.</p><p>"Overrated," she said to Karen, who looked up, startled, when Pam offered her a hand up to stand.</p><p>Hand in hand, they went upstairs. That was the last night the elevator worked; in the morning, the shaft had everted upward, through the roof, into a trellis of cables-become-vines. It was now a stalk, trembling toward the clouds; where it had been, the building puckered closed.</p><p>Pam dug out two pillows — one, a posture-thing her mom gave her one Secretary's Day (the same year, Michael gave her a beer-drinking hat and penis-shaped pasta), the other, one that Kelly and Meredith used for conference-room naps.</p><p>They slept in the conference room. Mose and Dwight took sentry, though against what, no one could say. Dwight shared his crinkly NASA blankets and found the big blue pashmina Michael had bought thinking it was a throw.</p><p>Pam hadn't shared a bed in months, not since Roy, and that was different. This was a floor, and Karen didn't sprawl. And she was Karen. Strange lights played over her face; Pam held herself tense, fearful of relaxing too much.</p><p>(What was too much? Too much, just enough, so much so that she might touch Karen accidentally.)</p><p>The red darkness on the beach still hovered behind her lids. Her heart beat in the arches of her feet, and she remembered she was in a different world.</p><p>Out by reception, Mose and Dwight sang "Schloof, Bobbeli, Schloof" to each other. It sounded like they did that every night.</p><p>Pam drew closer to Karen, who sighed and shifted into her.</p><p>-*-</p><p>Outside the conference room, the world had shimmered through multiple changes while they slept. Pam's desk at reception was now a bower, shady and cool. Her computer was a small, quiet spring bubbling silvery water; her stapler, a large black bird drinking from the spring.</p><p>The carpet was grass. The sky was high and bright. Mose was still, always Mose, though his skin was now delicately crepe-like lichen and his eyes bright stones. Like marbles, Pam thought, and worried over how <i>provincial</i> her imagination and its references were.</p><p>Then Karen said, sweetly as the water in the spring, "Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes."</p><p>"Huh?" Pam asked.</p><p>Mose grinned and handed them each a Nutter-Butter before skipping away.</p><p>Karen bit into her cookie, chewed, and continued, "Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange. Shakespeare."</p><p>"Overrated," Dwight replied as he passed the bower.</p><p>"Shakespeare's overrated?" Pam called. "Since when?"</p><p>"Get with the times, Pam," he said. "We're a post-literate culture now." There was a pause, and then he reappeared in the entrance to the bower. "Or we were. Now we're...."</p><p>He trailed off and turned away, as if he were concussed again.</p><p>"What he said," Pam said and Karen grinned.</p><p>"I was a lit major," Karen said after a bit. They'd drunk some water out of cupped palms and finished the cookies. </p><p>"Always thought you were an MBA or something," Pam admitted.</p><p>"We could check my résumé, but —" Karen pointed at the low, smooth rock that had replaced the bank of file cabinets. The rock looked like the ones left behind by glaciers; the surface was warm to the touch and Pam lay down on it, patting it to invite Karen.</p><p>"This is much better," Pam said when Karen joined her. Their hands found each other.</p><p>"Than an MBA? Definitely."</p><p>Pam turned her head to rest it on Karen's shoulder. Karen's profile was radiant, distinct, against the sky. </p><p>"I'm going to —" Pam took a breath and remembered the fire. She felt it pass through her all over again. Rather than finish speaking, rather than describe what she wanted to do, she acted. </p><p>They kissed, and Karen's hand came up to Pam's face, and they kept kissing. Songbirds swept overhead, their wings illuminating, then sharpening into shadows.</p><p>-*-</p><p>"You're glowing," Karen said.</p><p>Embarrassed, Pam's old self snickered and looked away. "Yeah, yeah."</p><p>Her new self remained still, blinking slowly as she regarded Karen.</p><p>Karen touched one Pam's cheek, then the other's  shoulder. "No, you <i>are</i>."</p><p>Pam looked down as Karen brought her other hand to Pam's waist. The two Pams shifted back together and her torso glowed with a warm, steady light. She should have thought of medieval Maries with radiant hearts, but all she could picture were the Christmas tree ornaments at her grampa's house, scratched-up painted glass snowmen that fit over each bulb on the string of lights.</p><p>Her chest glowed. Her feet glowed.</p><p>"This is so cool," Karen breathed.</p><p>Pam laughed, because what else could she do?</p><p>-*-</p><p>Karen found her by the creek that used to be the parking lot. Pam sat cross-legged, facing a twisted stump that used to be the bike rack. Her hand trailed in the creek's water.</p><p>"I don't know," she was saying, "everything's so different nowadays. Who can say?"</p><p>The stump sat motionless.</p><p>"Honey?" Karen asked softly. When Pam didn't respond, she added, a little more loudly, "Hey, Pam, whatcha doing?"</p><p>"Talking head," Pam replied, pointing to the stump. "Just finishing up."</p><p>-*-</p><p>When they kissed, the moss beneath them rippled like water. Small blue and purple flowers and mushrooms like bells budded.</p><p>"I said a lot back at the beach," Pam started. Somewhere down the creek, something thrashed in the undergrowth. Something else, up in a tree, sang with a woman's voice.</p><p>"Yeah," Karen said, laughing a little, ruefully. "You sure did."</p><p>"I'm not sorry."</p><p>When Karen frowned, her brows drew together like calligraphy scrolls, like loops in testing a pen. "Okay," she said. "That's good."</p><p>Pam exhaled.</p><p>"You <i>walked on fire</i>, dude."</p><p>She tried to shrug, but she was smiling, then laughing, then kissing Karen again. </p><p>-*-</p><p>Dwight beheaded Michael that afternoon. No one had seen Michael for a few days — they agreed it felt like days had passed, whatever the lights in the sky suggested — when he emerged from the tumulus that the warehouse had become. </p><p>They needed to give up on using names: that wasn't Michael. That was Michael's suit over a vaguely man-shaped form, composed of bare-twigged topiary woven with buxom, vividly scarlet fruiting bodies. The form was topped by a single enormous cabbage, easily four times the size of Michael's own skull. The leaves were waxy green and peeling.</p><p>"Halt!" Dwight ordered. </p><p>It hesitated. Spores hovered around the body like clinging gnats, describing another layer in a halo. </p><p>"You are not welcome here," Dwight called. Sometimes the new things in the world responded to the authority in his voice; sometimes, it was merely consolation for him to speak like this. "Return."</p><p>"Should I —" Karen had the big ball of rubber bands wrapped around a stone in her hand. Pam herself could not move.</p><p>The Michael-thing juddered in place, then jerked toward Dwight.</p><p>Dwight spun the pole in his hand, then thrust out with it; the top ten inches licked out at the end of a vicious-looking barbed chain. The Michael-thing bellowed when the flail struck him; then it shuffled closer and Dwight yanked back the flail, adjusted his stance, and sent it out flying again. This time the chain wrapped snug as a winter scarf around the thing's neck area. Dwight yelled something in karate-ese, jerked his wrist, and the cabbage popped off. The body wavered in place before crumbling into a small drift of twigs.</p><p>The cabbage thudded when it hit the ground and Mose jumped up and down on it. Spores billowed up with each impact until they coated Mose to the knees.</p><p>"Careful," Dwight told him as he crouched to inspect the leaves. "No telling what it might still be capable of."</p><p>Karen stuffed her rock back in her pocket and took Pam's hand. "Bredbeddle got <i>got</i>."</p><p>"More literature?"</p><p>She shook hair out of her eyes. The light was pearlescent today, edged with lavender. "Yeah, sorry."</p><p>"Don't be." </p><p>They headed down the creek, to where it curved around where the dumpsters used to be. It was getting harder to remember what was once in places. There was so much that was new now, including a young willow dragging its limber branches in the water.</p><p>Pam put her feet in the creek as she drew, sheets of paper balanced on her lap, and Karen told her more stories.</p>
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